‘I want to go to Beijing, wear high-heeled shoes and pink lipstick, you know.’
So she ran off to Beijing and Shanghai and became a successful singer, until she damaged her hearing. Far from giving up, she turned to fashion and went to live and work in San Francisco, New York, Paris, Italy and Japan. She lived with a Norwegian diplomat but that now seems to be over and she’s fallen for a Frenchman.
She tells me all this as the fire crackles and the smoke drifts lazily up into the rafters of what feels an essentially mediaeval cottage. Her aunt, thinking Namu is talking too much, tries to get at the fire to make us all a cup of salted butter tea.
The interesting thing about Namu is that she bothered to come back to Lugu Lake at all. Though she calls herself, wryly, ‘a five-star gypsy’, the claustrophobic world that drove her away still seems to have a hold on her.
I put it to her that she’s still trying to win the approval of the mother who rejected her and she nods. But it hasn’t been easy for either of them. What Namu did, and how she did it, was in every way extraordinary, but it nearly severed her links with her mother for ever.
She also seems genuinely fond of her people, describing herself as a ‘Mosuo cultural ambassador’. This seems to excite her and she leaps up. There is something we must see.
We’re whisked away to a nearby promontory, rising a few hundred feet above the lake. Here, looking like a half-built million-aire’s home in California, is Namu’s latest contribution to the Lugu Lake property boom, her own half-built museum.
She talks vaguely in terms of some sort of Mosuo cultural centre, but as we step carefully over pipes and piles of dust and rubble I get the distinct impression that this is a museum of Namu.
She waves towards a substantial three-sided space.
‘I’m going to put the translations of all my books from all over the world here.’
‘That’s huge, Namu. That makes the British Library look like a newspaper shop.’
But she has already moved on.
‘And this is my kitchen.’
She enthuses about work spaces and artists in residence, and ‘rooms for my best friends’. On a terrace outside we look down on the concrete shell of a swimming pool.
‘That’s the most beautiful view on the lake,’ she says, and it certainly is a glorious position, out there with the mountains beyond and small, wooded islets rising out of shimmering, silver-blue waters.
There are problems, however. The architect backed out halfway through, she’s had to sack the last lot of builders and is down to her last 5000 yuan (about PS350).
She looks around at the mess, apparently unperturbed.
‘My mamma think I’m crazy.’
I walk down some steps to a long, curving room with floor-to-ceiling window spaces, and there is the woman who so affected her life. There is Mamma, almost silhouetted against the declining sun. She’s short and wiry, wears a Mao-style fur hat and is smoking a cigarette. A doughty little lady with shrewd, quick eyes. She sees me taking in the bare walls and empty sockets of the unfinished room and when I turn back to her I can see the ghost of a smile. A quiet smile of satisfaction. Or is it just the smile of experience, the smile of a mother who knows that she understands her daughter better than her daughter will ever understand herself.
On the way back to the hotel we pass by the local village, to which Namu donated a school for 60 children. We detour to look at it. It’s run down and neglected. We can’t get in but we circle it and try to peer inside. Namu mutters something. She looks puzzled and vaguely hurt by the state of it, but I have the feeling she’s not surprised.
A little deflated, we return to the road. Namu dives into a car and heads back. Needing a bit of a breather, I walk back beside the lake, which is peaceful and unspoilt here.
Day Eighty One : Lugu Lake
The fans have gone and we have the 37-room hotel to ourselves. Well, ourselves and Namu. Namu, a little force-field of her own, is the centre of attention even when she’s not around. She either retreats, with her mobile, to deal with her complicated international life, or sweeps out, usually in a different outfit, firing on all cylinders, organizing, cajoling and demanding.
Having talked about the importance of the Flower Chamber in her upbringing, she wants to recreate one for me. Orders are given and we all repair to the Karaoke room and watch pop videos until Namu, now in a long, black, satin dress with green silk lining, arrives, flicks off her mobile, then swings herself up on a raised platform before the fireplace and, with the relish of a natural actress, begins the half-interview, half-performance. I am expected to be both interviewer and supporting actor.
Though the Mosuo have this reputation for sexual generosity, the process she describes seems conventional enough. The first sign of attraction may well have taken place at one of the circle dances, a touch of pressure on the hand, a piece of skilful positioning. But the Mosuo girls are always in control, she says. Before anyone got as far as the Flower Chamber she would have been playing the field, asking one to prove his love by throwing a stone further than anyone else, or singing more sweetly, or riding a horse faster.
Once allowed in, the lucky man would be offered butter tea and little delicacies such as a potato, an orange or sunflower seeds. If things were going well, some wine might be offered as well.
‘All this at 13?’
Namu shakes her head. At 13 they don’t usually go with men, but they begin to learn about sex from cousins, sisters and in her case from her mother, who, she says, gave her advice on ‘how a woman should sit to show she had self-respect’, and at the same time, ‘how to walk to show herself off’.
Namu digs at the fire.
‘The Chinese very secret, we’re quite open about things,’ she says, sliding a potato towards me.
‘My mother told me sex is very good for the skin. You get good sex, you don’t get pimples.’
I’m trying to find a polite way of asking how many men she slept with in her Flower Chamber, but she answers for me.
‘In my Flower Room I was still virgin.’
I ask her if they used any form of birth control. She shakes her head. It’s rather the opposite.
‘Many Mosuo women want to get pregnant but can’t,’ she says. ‘So they go to the Penis Cave on Gemu Goddess Mountain.’
‘The Penis Cave?’
Namu’s almond eyes widen.
‘It’s unbelievable. All stones look like a penis. They all different sizes.’
‘Does it work?’
She nods.
‘They go there to pray and normally after that they get pregnant.’
As a result of being allowed to choose their male partners and to have as many as they want without stigma, the Mosuo are seen in some way as less than civilized, but Namu sees it as quite the opposite. Theirs is a society that has no place for sexual jealousy and all the judgemental possessiveness that goes with it.
She says that her people are very like the native Americans she met in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
‘I walk in there and feel that I’m like their sister.’
Tonight is our last night at Namu’s and she has ordered a lamb to be grilled on the spit. First of all, though, there’s entertainment around an open fire in the centre of the courtyard. Everyone’s expected to sing. The crew are terrified and have been practising ‘The Lumberjack Song’ for days. The Mosuo women sing powerfully - hard, back-of-the-throat sounds that are often harsh and strident to our ears - but their range and control as they fly up and down the keys can be thrilling.
Then, with the men dressed like cowboys, they go into what they call Mosuo disco. Music thumps out from loudspeakers, but the movements owe more to line dancing than John Travolta. Namu talks often of East meeting West and Mosuo disco does seem to have brought Yunnan and Idaho a lot closer together.
Finally, a few rounds of circle dancing. Namu pulls me up and seems unfazed by my inability to get the footwork up to Fred Astaire or even Fred Flintstone standar
d.
‘It’s good exercise,’ she says blithely, and suddenly I see the real Namu. She tries hard to be the vamp, but at heart she’s the gym mistress. Must tell Joshua.
The drink flows and Namu’s brother, who runs the hotel, is full of bonhomie. After bottles of Dynasty Red, gin and cognac have been passed round, he insists we have one last toast in the local corn wine.
‘Tashi Delek!’ we all shout, clinking our glasses and knocking back the smoothly fierce brew.
Namu is nowhere to be seen.
Day Eighty Two : Lugu Lake to Lijiang
There’s a cockerel somewhere close by that wakes me every morning, long before it’s light. Today I time its first call at 3.29. To make matters worse, it crows only on one note, a monotone cry like someone pretending to be a ghost.
It gives me plenty of time to get my head together and prepare for an early start. Breakfast is basic and heavy. Noodles, hot, spicy cabbage and coils of pudgy, white, steamed bread, washed down with butter tea, made, of course, by Namu’s mother. Our drivers, like most other working people in China, carry plastic flasks of green tea at all times, wedging them perilously on the dashboard. Soon we’re packed, have said our farewells and are making our way on a slow loop round the lake, passing the Coca Cola Hope School, proof that Namu is not the only philanthropist in Lugu Lake. The red soil has turned to mud with recent rain, and the 12,000-foot (3660 m) summit of the Gemu Goddess Peak is lost in the clouds. Compared to where we’ve been, Gemu seems no more than a foothill, but we are still above 8000 feet (2440 m) and, even here, the snow will soon come and shut the passes and Lugu Lake will be cut off for three months of the winter.
This has been the easternmost point of our journey. We are some 2000 miles (3200 km) from the Khyber Pass, as the crow flies, and now we must turn back towards the Himalaya and follow the mountains as they make their great southern arc towards India and Burma.
Within a few hours we are riding into the Yangtze gorges again, this time on the other side of the Jade Dragon Snow range from Tiger Leaping, but into canyons just as stomach-tighteningly spectacular.
Shanzidou, at 18,350 feet (5590 m) is the tallest of 13 limestone pinnacles that crown the summit of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. With its brilliant white scarf of snow, this jagged diadem of ice and snow effortlessly dominates the northwestern horizon as we enter the village of Baisha.
Surrounded by a fertile plain, it’s a quiet, attractive little place. Its main streets are more like lanes, with water rushing down open culverts, past houses of traditional mud-brick built on stone bases and topped with alpine-style, wide-eaved roofs. Some of the buildings, including a fine stone gate-tower, suggest grander times, and, indeed, Baisha was once the capital of the Naxi kingdom, before it was conquered by Kublai Khan 800 years ago.
In recent years it has rediscovered fame as the home of He Shixiu, known to the world as Dr Ho, one of the leading lights of Chinese traditional medicine. It’s not hard to find his house, partly because the bus stops right outside and partly because of a battery of display boards leaning against the trees and covered with press headlines.
‘The Famous Dr Ho’, ‘Dr Ho - He Has Many Friends’, ‘He Loves Open-Door Policy’ and ‘Bruce Chatwin - 17 Years Ago He Stayed Here for Two Weeks’.
His son, Ho Shulong, emerges from the front door of a modest, two-storey house to welcome us. For a moment, it’s hard to get a word in edgeways, as he reels off details of his father’s worldwide fame. Some 500 articles about him in 40 languages, 300,000 people treated in 40 countries. National Geographic Channel are here today to talk about making a film about him, as is a British woman who already has made a film about him, called The Most Admired Man.
The walls of the front room are adorned with hundreds of visiting cards as well as pictures of Mao, the Queen, Princess Di and Deng Xiaoping. Several of Bruce Chatwin’s books, in plastic wrapping, hang from the ceiling like holy relics. My own visit has caused enormous excitement, for apparently I have been here before, with John Cleese, my fellow Monty Python.
Before I can clear this one up, Dr Ho appears, sidling diffidently into the room. He must be in his mid-seventies, and sports a black, knitted scarf and hat and a white lab coat. His face is that of the classic wise old Chinaman, thin, with a wispy white beard and moustache. His eyes are bright and responsive.
He clutches my hand and says how nice it is to see me again.
I’m aware of other visitors hovering - a French girl, two Japanese and two Australian doctors, who tell me they are here to discuss Dr Ho’s treatment of prostate cancer. Ho Shulong, hearing our conversation, thrusts a sheaf of documents in front of me. They’re from a physician at the Mayo Clinic in America, acknowledging the part that Dr Ho’s herbal treatment played in the recovery of a patient from prostate cancer.
I’m taken through to Dr Ho’s consulting room. It’s modest, like the house itself, and a bit of a mess. The floor is covered with red plastic buckets and there are various preparations open on the shelves.
‘So, old friend, nice to see you again,’ he repeats.
I can’t lie, but I don’t want to spoil whatever game he’s playing.
‘You’re looking well,’ I offer, neutrally.
‘I’m 80 years old and getting stronger,’ he grins.
He sits me down on a lab stool and I tell him of the hard travelling I’ve been doing and the fatigue and all that.
He asks me about my lower back, then asks me to put out my tongue.
He nods.
‘Take care of the food,’ he advises. ‘Eat simple food.’
‘The pork is very good in Yunnan,’ I suggest.
‘I think pork not so good.’
He checks my pulse and nods reassuringly.
‘Good pulse, no high blood pressure. No high cholesterol, no liver fat, no kidney stone, no gall bladder stone.’
I feel like someone who’s just won a scholarship. And Dr Ho isn’t through yet.
‘This morning many French people come. Some have high cholesterol.’
‘Yes?’
‘Fat liver.’
‘Ah.’
‘Diabetes.’
‘Really?’
‘High blood pressure.’
‘It’s all that French food.’
‘But your chi is weak.’
‘Oh.’
‘You know “chi”? It is your energy levels.’
I nod. Here comes the bad news.
‘And your stomach. And you have a Chinese cold, a little Chinese cold. I see it from your lips.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘But be happy, happiness is best medicine you know.’
Happiness alone is clearly not going to be enough for me, and he sets to work preparing some of his herbal remedies. He will make something up for me. I glance at the labels as he measures out the powder. Fennel, Plantain, Wrinkled Giant Hyssop, Indian Madder, Chinese Sage, Nepal Geranium.
The slopes of Jade Dragon Mountain are famous throughout China as the Home of Medicinal Plants, with over 600 species available. Dr Ho takes pride in the fact that all the ingredients he uses are either grown here or collected from the surrounding hills by himself or members of his family. No outsiders involved, and nothing bought from markets.
Clutching my various powders in brown paper cones, I return to the now even more crowded front room to be met by Dr Ho’s son with an open visitors’ book bearing incontrovertible proof that Michael Palin and John Cleese did indeed come here some five years ago. Unfortunately, our names and comments are the work of a man from Woking who clearly thought he was being very funny.
I try to explain the error but Mr Ho Junior is not really interested. He’s now jettisoned the visitors’ book and is showing us out through a small back garden, where seeds are drying in wide, shallow baskets, and onto a wooden verandah where food is being set out. Dr Ho’s wife, a beautiful woman, and a calming presence too, is supervising what turns out to be a wonderful meal, served in dishes that spread over the
table and beyond: hyacinth, water-lily, anchovy, baby pig, Yunnan ham, tofu, broccoli and more.
She wears traditional Naxi costume: a blue bonnet and deep blue top with a white apron and a quilted cape tightly secured by two cross-ribbons and on its back a slip of white fur, representing the day, and above it a dark blue cloth representing the night.
Dr Ho joins us and I learn a little more about him.
Though he was always fascinated by herbal medicine, he was reviled by the Red Guards, who smashed his place up, and he was unable to get back his licence to practise until the start of the ‘Open-Door’ policy in 1985. Even then, he could practise only at public hospitals. Nowadays he will see anyone and only asks people to pay what they can afford.
He was clearly inspired by the work of Dr Joseph Rock, an irascible, dedicated Austro-American botanist who lived and worked in southwest China for 27 years, until forced to leave after the Revolution in 1949. He admired the ethnic minorities and was apprehensive of their domination by the Han Chinese. He compiled an English-Naxi dictionary and sent back to the West a collection of 80,000 botanical specimens.
It was ‘Rock’s Kingdom’, Bruce Chatwin’s report for the New York Times in 1986, that brought Dr Ho to a world audience.
Which is why we’re here today. And as far as everyone at Dr Ho’s is concerned, I’m a regular visitor.
Day Eighty Three : Lijiang
From my hotel window two things compete for space in an otherwise clear blue sky. One is Jade Dragon Snow Mountain and the other is the great glass and steel tower of the China Construction Bank.
Lijiang is a tale of two cities: one a modern concoction of business district office blocks and shopping malls, the other an immaculately kept old town, with clay-tiled roofs, cobbled streets and a canal system that evokes Venice, Amsterdam or Bruges. Lijiang became rich and famous because of its key position on the Tea-Horse Route from Tibet into China, but its idyllic situation, set comfortably in a shallow bowl of hills, is deceptive. A fault line at the edge of the Tibetan plateau runs below and the ripple effect of the tectonic collision that created the Himalaya has been responsible for over 50 strong earthquakes here in the last 130 years. The most recent, which registered over seven on the Richter scale, hit Lijiang in 1996, killing 300 and injuring 16,000. Many buildings were damaged or destroyed. The majority of them were in the new city.
Himalaya (2004) Page 23